R.S. Butler's Trading Company owner and music record and memorabilia collector Don Pingree holds a Beatles album with an alternate cover as the record label felt the original cover was too graphic. (John Huff/Staff photographer)

NORTHWOOD — Last week, Don Pingree sold a pair of tickets to a Led Zeppelin concert that never happened.

The tickets fetched $777, a sum that left even Pingree, a record dealer and vintage music connoisseur, surprised. A friend had been holding on to them for years. She finally asked Pingree to put them up for sale through his online music store “Wingo's Wecords.”

Like much of Pingree's merchandise, the tickets are steeped in musical history. They were printed for a concert scheduled to take place at the old Boston Garden in 1975. Pingree says Boston Mayor Kevin White refused to issue a license for the rock show because he believed people waiting to buy tickets had damaged the venue. The band had to scrap the Boston show and play in Long Island instead.

Stories from the annals of music history are rife throughout Pingree's business in Northwood. Along with his wife, Colleen, Pingree sells music and memorabilia out of the couple's antiques shop, R.S. Butler's Trading Company.

Now 61, Pingree has been collecting music for decades, and he struggles to even guess at the number of vinyl records in his possession. He also has scores of magazines, promotional posters for bands, cardboard cutouts from record stores, vintage T-shirts and other musical ephemera.

Vinyl records have become a hot commodity once again, and Pingree has developed into the sole supplier for Bullmoose Music's stores in Portsmouth and Salem. Pingree says he moves between about 500 and 600 pieces of vinyl between the two stores each week.

But the most profitable part of his business takes place online, where a wide array of record collectors have tapped into his store on the auction site eBay. When he was contacted on one recent Monday, Pingree had shipped 49 boxes of records -- mainly to dealers overseas who purchase them one at a time.

Located on Northwood's “Antiques Alley,” there are few signs on the outside of Pingree's business that would indicate the 19th-century building is home to a stash of significant music memorabilia. And little on the exterior of the lavender building would reveal that the collection inside is curated by a man who also helped to uncover a gem in the history of North American soul music.

But walk inside, and the signs of someone with a deep respect for musical history are on display. In one corner hangs a poster advertising a 1990s-era performance by The Meters, a personal favorite from Pingree's college radio days. A framed picture of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles hangs in another portion of the shop. A message on the photo, which is signed by singer Pete Moore, reads: “To Donnie and Colleen.”

Mike Cohen, owner of Pitchfork Records in Concord, says he's been in the business for 39 years, but he continues to pick up new tips about music history from Pingree.

“He's the eBay king, and he's probably the most knowledgeable person that I know of in the industry,” Cohen said.

Crate digging

For Pingree, the thrill of collecting vinyl is in finding rare items, which are laced throughout his stacks of music.

During a recent tour, he flipped through a pile of records and produced a copy of Ozzy Osbourne's tribute album to late guitarist Randy Rhoads. Osbourne had signed it twice on the back -- once in red, and once in blue. From another pile, Pingree pulled out a copy of the 1956 album “Songs for Lazy Afternoon,” by the beat poet Rod McKuen. “To my friend Joe, with warmest wishes,” read a signature on the back. “Thanks for the pills, Rod.”

“It's easy to sell rare stuff online,” Pingree said. “When you have rare stuff, but the key is, you know, Rush is a perfect example. I never paid attention to Rush because I never listened to them ... but they sell like crazy.”

Pingree doesn't advertise, but through word of mouth, his business has been picking up, driven in part by interest from University of New Hampshire students. For years, Pingree didn't sell any $1 records — he was donating 20,000 to 30,000 records a year to Goodwill. But he's recently outfitted his antiques shop with a new vinyl section.

The collection runs the gamut — rock, easy listening, jazz, spoken word, soundtracks, original casts, comedy albums, country music, 12-inch singles, box sets, rhythm and blues, soul. With his reputation as a dealer established in the area, Pingree receives calls everyday from people looking to sell vinyl.

Pingree has tens of thousands of records in storage. The “heavy stuff” — items that will sell well -- goes on eBay as soon as he finds it. Some of the most sought-after records on the market these days are the so-called “garage records” cut by smaller bands that didn't gain a large following. Rare “northern soul” records can also go for thousands of dollars. The genre includes obscure soul albums from the 1960s — a time when the Motown sound was being replicated in pockets around the country.

Starting out in business

Pingree didn't begin amassing his collection in earnest until he began working at a record store in Portsmouth in the late 80s. However, his musical interest grew from a young age.

Pingree grew up in Georgetown, Mass., with three older brothers and a younger sister. His father worked at General Electric, and his mother was a nurse. His older brothers got him into soul music when he was a teenager, bringing home Otis Redding, Ray Charles and others in the 1960s.

In 1966, when he was in high school, Pingree subscribed to the music trade magazine Billboard, which cost $40 a year at the time, without telling his father.

“It started coming to the door and my father went nuts,” he said. “We laugh about now that I'm making a living selling records.”

Don's collection was modest — a couple of hundred records — before college. Then he launched a radio show from Springfield College's 10-watt radio station while he was enrolled there.

“I listened to every new release that came in,” he said. “I spent more time in the radio station than I did in classes.”

Pingree broadcast from 10 p.m. Sunday to 2 a.m. Monday. The time slot gave him the flexibility to play anything he chose, and he queued up rock, soul and jazz recordings each week, ranging from Curtis Mayfield to Gram Parsons, Gil Scott-Heron and Steely Dan.

“At that time in colleges, there was a real dividing line between black music and white music,” he remembered, “and you almost had a station drawn along racial lines, and I would have none of that. I played everything on my show.”

After playing as captain of his college basketball team, Pingree left the country after graduating in 1975 to play professional basketball in Venezuela for one year. In the disco days that followed, Pingree was going to clubs, listening to music and buying records. He then embarked on a career as a record dealer while working at a record store in Portsmouth.

With an ear for soul music and funk, Pingree chose a good time to get into business, because the classic vinyl recordings of the past two decades were about to be in heavy demand.

The sounds of joy

In the 1980s and 1990s, music producers in New York City looked to rare vinyl records to provide the building blocks for the rap beats that would later become famous. It was this same music that Pingree had been seeking out for years.

“I had foreigners coming to my house, because I knew that at that time the 70s, 60s R&B was very hot, and funky music, and I knew the stuff, because I used to play it back in my college days...” he said. “Then I started selling breakbeats to a guy in NY, a dealer in NY. I knew what they were looking for to sample, the rappers, and he was selling directly to A Tribe Called Quest.”

The dealer was John Carraro, whose father was a noted record collector. Carraro developed a reputation for having records on the cutting edge of the hip-hop scene, and he became a source for some of the prominent producers of the time.

Pingree says he knew what Carraro was looking for in the records — maybe a drumbeat, or a guitar riff — something that could be looped into a new musical form.

“It was like a paycheck for me,” Pingree said. “Every week, he'd buy $200 or $500 bucks worth of records off me. I'd play him a little bit over the phone, and he'd say, 'Yah, what do you want for that?'”

None of Pingree's finds made a bigger splash, however, than a lost Canadian funk album called “Wayne McGhie & The Sounds of Joy.” Produced in 1970, the album had been all but forgotten to history due to a fire in the warehouse where copies of the original records were stored.

Pingree said he found a copy in a store in Keene, N.H., and played it for Carraro over the phone. Pingree said he was drawn to the recording because it reminded him of the Meters.

Carraro quickly sold the album, which became highly sought-after in the vinyl-collecting world.

“I probably sold him the record for $40 bucks and it became a $1,000 record overnight when somebody sampled it,” Pingree said.

Carraro offered the same recollection of events when he was interviewed by disc jockey and music journalist Kevin Howes. In a review that appears on the website of The Museum of Canadian Music, Carraro discussed purchasing the album from Pingree in 1995. In his interview with Howes, Carraro said he sold the first copy of Wayne McGhie & the Sounds of Joy to a rapper named Prince Be, from the hip-hop duo PM Dawn.

“I put the needle down on the break beat and he just looked at me and with his hands was like 'Up, take it off. Take it off!' I took it off, handed it to him, and he hid it. The first one went for $300.” Carraro said he went on to sell additional copies of the record to producers Pete Rock, Gary G-Whiz, of the group Public Enemy, and others, who used samples from the music to build hip-hop beats.

Selling records online

For a time, Don expanded the business to the point where he was traveling as far away as Florida to pick up promising stashes of vinyl, shipping home between 500 and 1,000 records at a time.

Then the inception of the internet changed the business — specifically eBay, which Pingree and his wife began using heavily around 1998. While it takes more work, selling on eBay has opened Pingree up to a wide array of collectors across the globe.

Nowadays, the CD player in Pingree's car is broken, and he spends most of his commuting time listening to sports talk radio. When he does have music on at home, he likes to listen to alternative country and bebop jazz, though everything is fair game.

Pingree says the vinyl market looks to be expanding once again — particularly in the last year-and-a-half. Even records that came out in the 1990s in limited releases, such as some Pearl Jam records, can fetch a fair price as well.

“The collectibility of it is amazing,” he said.

Pingree said he understands the desire some new consumers might feel for a physical connection with the culture they consume.

“Holding a record in your hand while you're listening to it and reading that cover, that got lost with CDs, and even more lost with iPods and downloads,” he said.

Still, Pingree said he's surprised at the resurgence of vinyl sales. It seems like every kid at UNH has a turntable now, he says.

“I think that there was a unique time in culture, the 50s and 60s and 70s, and there's a lot of kids that grew up in these times now that kind of wish they had grown up then,” Pingree said. “You know what I mean? I really do ... But there's going to be nostalgia for this time period, too.”